The Divine Vision of Dante's Paradiso : The Metaphysics of Representation

Bristling with interdisciplinary insights, this book will open up new dimensions for Dante scholars and attract researchers from a host of other fields, not least philosophy and theology. Alongside critical theory and phenomenology, William Franke also spotlights Dante's striking pertinence to emergent fields in media studies and iconology.

In Canto XVIII of Paradiso, Dante sees thirty-five letters of Scripture - LOVE JUSTICE, YOU WHO RULE THE EARTH - ''painted'' one after the other in the sky. It is an epiphany that encapsulates the Paradiso, staging its ultimate goal - the divine vision. This book offers a fresh, intensive reading of this extraordinary passage at the heart of the third canticle of the Divine Comedy. While adapting in novel ways the methods of the traditional lectura Dantis, William Franke meditates independently on the philosophical, theological, political, ethical, and aesthetic ideas that Dante''s text so provocatively projects into a multiplicity of disciplinary contexts. This book demands that we question not only what Dante may have meant by his representations, but also what they mean for us today in the broad horizon of our intellectual traditions and cultural heritage.